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This is an extremely bad idea.
He’s not a household name, but a former world champion is making a late career switch from boxing to MMA.
Cameroon’s Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam (37-5, 21 KOs) has signed with ARES FC, a promotion which already boasts former UFC fighters Will Brooks, Nordine Taleb, Wilson Reis, and Eric Shelton. Most importantly, they have Reug Reug.
N’Dam’s debut is unknown, and it’s also uncertain whether he’ll return to the boxing ring any time soon, but the 36-year-old has done some sparring with current UFC heavyweight prospect Cyril Gane. He’s also been giving members of the Villeneuve-Saint-Georges hospital in France boxing lessons, as a way of repaying the staff who helped his father-in-law recover from COVID-19.
As a boxer, N’Dam held the WBO middleweight title in 2012 (after he was promoted from interim to full champ status) and won the WBA’s secondary middleweight belt in 2017, although virtually everyone except two of judges thought that he lost to Ryoto Murata. His notable wins aside from Murata are against Avtandil Khurtsidze, Curtis Stevens, Martin Murray, and Max Bursak.
N’Dam’s career highlight was undoubtedly this KO of the Year contender of Alfonso Blanco back in 2016. For someone not known as a vicious puncher, that was a beautiful a one-hitter quitter as you’ll ever see.
Now the bad stuff: Hassan is past his prime in boxing and he gets knocked down a lot.
Officially, he’s only been stopped twice in five career defeats. What makes a couple of N’Dam’s losses so unusual is the fact that he went the distance against Peter Quillin and David Lemieux despite getting knocked down a combined ten times. Quillin put N’Dam on the floor six times, creating three 10-7 rounds yet only losing 115-107 on the scorecards. Against Lemieux, he was dropped four times and much like the Quillin fight (which was closer than the judges had it), he went the distance and won many of the rounds in which he wasn’t on the canvas.
That good fortune ran out up a weight class against Callum Smith last June, as he was knocked down three times and didn’t make it to the final bell. He also had a corner stoppage defeat in the rematch vs. Murata. In his last appearance vs. Fedor Chudinov, N’Dam lost a lopsided decision and did not perform anywhere near the standard of his peak success.
So a 36-year-old boxer with a history of knockdowns suffered is headed to MMA, a sport in which he has no prior experience.
Good luck with that.